Mark Twain memoir and the 'filthy-minded' secretary

Mark Twain's scandalous relationship with his "filthy-minded and salacious"
secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, is to be revealed in memoirs published 100
years after the author's death.

The book is likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man, instead detailing his petty rages and uncomplimentary views of contemporaries.
Photo: CORBIS

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles

10:00PM BST 11 Jun 2010

The unedited 5,000-page autobiography, which Twain refused to make public during his lifetime, will lay bare his feelings for Isabel Van Kleek Lyon.

The book is likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man, instead detailing his petty rages and uncomplimentary views of contemporaries.

Before his death in 1910, Twain decreed that his full manuscript should not be published for a century so that he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent" and could speak his "whole frank mind".

His opinion of Lyon is certainly frank. The "comely" brunette was hired in 1902 to manage Twain's correspondence. The pair became inseparable following the death of Twain's wife, Olivia, two years later.

She adored Twain, referring to him as "the King" in her diaries and believing him to be "the gentlest, most considerate, most lovable creature in all the Earth". She dreamed of marrying him, but to no avail, and ended up marrying his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft.

Twain sacked Lyon in 1909, claiming she had tried to steal from him and had attained power of attorney over him by "hypnotising" him for three years. He also claimed Lyon tried to seduce him by lying around the house in "silken dainties", but he refused to succumb.

Over 400 pages of the manuscript are given over to Lyon, whom Twain denounces as a "filthy-minded and salacious slut".

Laura Trombley, author of Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years, who has seen the manuscript, said: "He spent five months of the last 12 months he was alive writing about Isabel Lyon. He was obsessed with her. It reveals Twain at his nastiest.

"This is Twain probably at his most unpleasant and angriest and most vindictive. I think it will pretty much shatter the popular impression of a cheerful old man who went wise cracking to his grave. He really wanted to haunt her to the grave.

"There's this popular conception of him being carved out of marble and pure. But he smoked an average of 300 cigars a month, and he drank every day. He was a very sexual person."

The autobiography is to be published in three volumes by the University of California, Berkeley, which holds the documents in a vault. The first will be released to coincide with Twain's 175th birthday on November 30.

Twain, author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was a towering figure in his own lifetime, lauded as the greatest American humourist of his age, and the father of American literature.

Historians say his autobiography could cast him in a new light, detailing personal scores he wanted to settle, uncomplimentary views of contemporaries, and his religious and political convictions.

Another person to feel the lash of Twain's pen is Lillian Aldrich, wife of his friend, the poet and novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

She had never heard a Missouri accent like Twain's before and, when Twain visited, she assumed he was drunk and declined to let him into the drawing room. "He hated Lillian Aldrich until the day he died," said Trombley.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 and once famously referred to reports of his own death being an "exaggeration". He actually died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut.

Several edited versions of his autobiography have been published previously and the author himself released some snippets to magazines during his lifetime, but more than half of it has never been printed.

Twain began writing it in 1870 and it consists of rambling, non-sequential reminiscences and anecdotes based on, as he put it, whatever interested him "for the moment." According to the publishers it will reveal an "authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humour, ideas and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended."